Goodbye To a River, for those unfamiliar, was published in 1960. It’s Graves’ account of a canoe trip down a stretch of the Brazos River, a stretch he’d loved as a boy, a stretch that was about to be dammed — and damned — to create a reservoir.

The book’s spare elegance and haunting, sad beauty can’t be adequately described — at least, not by me. Goodbye To a River is sometimes compared to Walden. With apologies to Thoreau, that comparison doesn’t do Graves justice.

I can’t tell you how many copies of Graves’ book I’ve bought over the years to give as gifts. Usually, these are going-away presents to young writers who’ve passed through The Morning News on their way to wherever, often without staying long enough to learn about the Texas that exists beyond our bland, sprawling cities. I don’t know if any of those young writers were half as moved by the book as I was. I hope so.

Years ago, I got to spend a day with Graves. I was writing about a plan by the state to dam a small river near Glen Rose — a plan that eventually died a quiet, deserving death. The dam would have flooded a tiny town called Paluxy, and it would have brought unwanted development to the country around Graves’ farm home in Somervell County. (Since I can’t find an online version to link to — some things, including my journalism career, predate the Internet — I’ve attached my story after the jump.)

Graves was in his late 60s then, no longer writing much, and living a quiet life. I got to tell him, as hundreds of would-be writers surely had done before, just how much Goodbye To a River meant to me. Graves was cordial, in a reserved, rancher’s sort of way, in accepting my gushy compliments.

After my story about Paluxy ran, I sent him a copy (I had quoted him in the piece) and I proposed that he let me write something about him: what he was up to, how he spent his days, his reflections on his writing career and on the ‘progress’ that Texas had made in the decades since he’d made that canoe trip down his beloved Brazos.

I got a letter back. If I’ve saved it, I don’t know where it is. It was brief, composed on a typewriter, as I recall. Graves said something polite about my story, and declined — politely, but with certainty — to be interviewed for a profile.

At the urging of one of my editors, I tried once or twice more to persuade Graves to agree to sit with me. He kept saying no.

In truth, I was relieved.

In the first place, anything I wrote about him would have been laughably inadequate.

More importantly, I didn’t want to intrude on his tranquility. We journalists do it all the time, I know. I’ve done it plenty of times before and since.

But I figured that if anyone had earned the right to be left the hell alone, it was John Graves.